Thursday, May 30, 2013

This is Trevor Hache earlier today, quitting the Ontario NDP over their rejection of revenue models to expand transit options for families in the Greater Toronto and Greater Hamilton Area.

Hache twice ran for the NDP in Ottawa-Vanier, and as Policy Director for Ecology Ottawa, a major Ottawa-area environmental organization which he was also a founding member of. (In the interest of full disclosure, I also worked for Ecology Ottawa for several months as a fundraising canvasser.)

Horwath moved the ONDP away from promoting public transit and sound environmental policy in the last election when the ONDP platform included a plank to use your tax dollars to subsidize gas prices for big gas guzzling cars. The ONDP's latest move to shows they continue to reject real models for public transit funding, and it'll be interesting to see how the rump environmental wing of the ONDP handles Horwath embracing the Rob Ford position on public transit.

1 comment:

The better way to fund transit is for Toronto or Ontario to capture the rise in land values (economic rent) that accrues to the land near publicly funded infrastructure. Toronto is already using tax increment financing (TIF) to finance the York University line. Many cities, notably Hong Kong, finance transit with Land Value Taxation.Land Value capture makes transit self-financing. Warranted new transit always generates more wealth than the cost of the infrastructure — wealth that should accrue to the city or the province and used to finance the transit. And since a land value capture is levied against land value only — not buildings — it will not penalize land owners for new construction near transit stops.Unlike tolls, sales and income taxes, collecting the rental value of land isn’t a additional tax; it doesn’t take the money people actually earn. Instead it collects the unearned rise in land values (economic rent) that always occurs near new infrastructure making it the ideal source of revenue to finance transit.Frank de Jong, President, Earthsharing Canada, Toronto